#captain britan

[nightcrawlersimpblog]

Am I allowed to say that Meggan fumbled??? Like... Ngl, I fucking hate Captain Britain. He's a huge dick.

Kurt loved her for who she is and that empath should have known that ✋🙄

She makes herself so pretty for Captain Bitch, but even when she shifted to make herself look how she felt (undesirable bc of Captain lil Bitch) Kurt still told her how beautiful she was.

Bc he's constantly been told it's what's on the inside that counts, he can see her light even when she doesn't.

[purple--queen]

i just love peggy carter

[spotforme]

Imagine the times after his death that the Captain has found out that another war has started again. i don't know britan's involment in any of the four wars (that i know of) after the 2ndWW but i imagine it must be aweful to hear another one has strarted again.

[cinematicnomad]

what is the Terror about? is it inspired by true life events? it feels like it is but my brain only brings up unrelated soldier things i sort of learned through the magnus archives (that is 99% due to the fact that i have studied ancient-medieval history and the last time i looked something modern history up it was bc tma mentioned it😭) anyway. it looks...good? is it good?

the terror IS based on real life, but it is definitely a fictionalized take on this piece of history. this is specifically an adaptation of a work of historical fiction by the same name.

there was an expedition in the 1840s where the british were trying to find the northwest passage...aka a potential trade route from britan to asia through the canadian arctic. the real expedition did include two ships, the hms erebus and hms terror, that were manned with 130 men of which none ever returned. evidence tells us they were trapped by ice for more than a year, that at least two dozen men died during that time, and that the men eventually abandoned the ships to try and walk to rescue only to disappear and, presumably, perish on that journey as well. what evidence remains points to a lot of different causes of death (scurvy, lead poisoning, starvation, exposure to the elements, and more....but also some signs of cannibalism).

the show follows all of those facts, and the characters are all made up of the real men who worked on those ships (jared harris plays captain francis crozier who was second-in-command, and tobias menzies plays erebus's second, commander james fitzjames). the fictional element comes into play through the addition of a massive, mystical creature that is terrorizing the ships and the men.

i am VERY obsessed with the show if you can't tell from my daily gifsets, and if you like TMA i think you'll get a kick out of this show. it's definitely a horror show but the relationships between the characters are SO good. i binged the whole first season in a single night (there IS a second season but the show is an anthology series so it's not related to the franklin expedition and i have never watched it). i highly recommend it to anyone who is even vaguely intrigued by the gifsets i've been posting. if you're in the states, the show is available on hulu!

[popculturebuffet]

Analysis of X: Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn

In honor of britan’s premire superhero team returning today, we take a look back at the original team. Kitty Pryde and Nightcrawler must team up with a drunkard magical british superman and his chipper shapeshifting sorta girlfriend to save their old teammate from an alternate dystopian future with the power of a god from both a squad of skin stealing wolves sicced on her by a sinsiter reality show producer from another dimension and a group of intergalactic weirdo bounty hunters after her due to an entirely separate omniversal dictator who wants to bang british superman. Somehow, Grant Morrison didn’t write this. I would like to, if I may, take you on a strange journey after the cut. 

Excalibur has always been the odd mutant out of the X-Men franchise.And that’s in part because the bulk of it’s mythos and characters come not from the deep wells of the X-Men comics of the time, but from another character Chris Claremont had a huge hand in: Captain Britain

Created shortly after Claremont got his start on the All-New All-Diffrent X-Men, redefining the X-Men forever and making them into the sales juggernaut they were for the 80′s and early to mid-90′s and are again today at long last, Captain Britan was Brian Braddock, a scientist who, while escaping a hired goon who torched his workplace, crashed his motorbike. He was saved by, of all things, Merlin... yes exactly the one your thinking of.... and his daughter and omniveral guardian Roma. They choose Brian to be their champion choosing either the staff of right or the sword of might and, not really being a fighter, Brian chose the staff and a hero was born. 

Cap was created for the UK Divison of Marvel and while Claremont did a sizeable amount of work on the character, including introducing Brian’s sister and future X-Man and as of this week Captain Britan herself Betsy Braddock,  it was two other men who made most of his mythos and the stuff that would end up being the backbone of Excalibur: Alan Davis, an absolutely monsterous talent of an artist and all around nice guy and... your going to want to sit down if you don’t know this I sure as hell was surprised, Alan Fucking Moore... and if that’s not his actual middle name it should be. Yes he of long beards, genere definting runs and yelling at the young people to get off his lawn and DC to stop hurting his baby Watchmen, THAT Alan Moore worked for marvel breifly. This was his only work with them shockingly. Not so shockingly he and Davis redefined the character, created most of the concepts that would be carried over to Excalibur, and gave the character a spiffy new costume seen above, one so good it’s stuck even into the modern era. Moore, and some other artists in addition to Davis, crafted a long epic about Cap going up against Mad Jim Jaspers, a reality warping mutant who was as insane as his name suggested and introduced many things that would become the backbone of the character, as well as establishing Moore’s habit of taking a less than sucessful B-List hero and utterly turning him on his head. Their also the ones who dubbed Marvel’s main universe 616, a fun fact I honestly had forgotten.  But of course after Moore left Cap fell by the wayside, making a cameo or too in other marvel books in the US while Betsy made her way to the X-Men just when they needed new blood most. More on that in a bit. But he wouldn’t stay on the sidelines for long. See Chris Claremont has a habit of taking characters he created and using them later if they’d been forgotten somehow or put off to the wayside. Mystique, one of the x-men’s most iconic enemies... was a Ms.Marvel (The carol danvers one before she got the rank up), enemy. Sabertooth? An old iron fist villian he’d created and taken a shine to. Arcade was inveted for a team up of Spider-Man and Captain Britan before primarily becoming an X-Men villian for most of his life. And of course Betsy was a a supporting character who became one of the x-men’s most iconic members through a weird mind swap with a japanese woman before recently getting her old body back. Claremont dosen’t like leaving his charcters to twist in the wind and thus brought most of them into the x-men mythos. Even Spider-Woman, depowered at the time, ended up as a major Wolverine supporting character. One of Claremont’s strengths as a writer to me is that he never truly forgot anything he created or worked on, and the X-Men benefited greatly from it.  So while it probably surprised american readers who only thought of Captain Britain as a c-list hero who teamed up with Spider-Man and Captain America, it’s no surprise in hindsight that for his second X-Men ongoing, having also made a TON of mini series, he choose to bring Brian to the big time. While I can’t find much background on Excalibur, I conjecture that Chris wanted to go a bit lighter. 

The X-Men were in a DARK place at the time. I mean the X-Men were never all sunshine and roses but most of the humor of the book and lighter moments were gone at the time thanks to the Mutant Massacre, an event where the Morlocks, a group of disfigured homeless mutants who felt at odds with society and thus lived in the tunnels under New York, were slaughtered by professional hitsquad the Mauraders who killed all but a handful of them and during the fight with the X-men took 3 of them out of commission:  Nightcrawler had fallen into a coma after overtaking his already crippled teleportation powers defeating one of the mauraders, Kitty Pryde slowly started to disappear, unable to phase back to solid after taking an electric spear for Rouge, and Colossus was heavily wounded in ways I forgot and since he rejoined the X-Men, aren’t really relevant here anyway. The X-Men were up against the wall against a barrage of ruthless opponents, working with longtime foe  magneto since Xavier got trapped in space, as you do, and were not in a really happy place. So it feels like, even if the angst was still present because Claremont would go into withdrawl if there wasn’t some form of angst to work off, Excalibur was created as a way for him to do something different in the X-Mold and lighter so he could go as dark as he needed to. So by injuring Kitty and Kurt, he took them off the board and had a starting point for the team, and by adding Captain Britan and his girlfriend Meggan, a shapeshifting  empath brought back one of his own creations and brought him into the american side of Marvel, and gave him an almost complete team. It also had the bonus of likely enticing Alan Davis, who in one of the few background things I could find about this book, didn’t really want to work on an established title like X-Men where there were expectations how it was supposed to look etc. But they were still about one member short of a team... but thankfully chris claremont had squared away a spare x-man for just such an occasion. 

Enter. Phoenix, aka Rachel Summers. The daughter of Jean Grey and Scott Summers from the Days of Future Past timeline, Rachel ended up in our timeline, bonded to the Phoenix Force like her mom, and struggling with the power, eventually running away after attempting to kill Selene, an evil sorceress who hunted her in an attempt to drain her power. She fled, not sure wether she should rejoin her team or not, and was instead lured into joining Mojo on the promise of a new start. Mojo.. is this guy. 

Strap yourselves in for this one: Mojo is the dictator of another dimension that runs off TV, essentially crafting shows for the media hungry populous and kidnapping the X-Men every so often to show up on his programs, to the point he once swapped Psylocke’s natural eyes out with robot camera eyes that looked like the normal eyes so he could record the X-Men’s adventures as it happened, which itself isn’t a bad concept. He didn’t show up to Rachel in person of course, partly because he’s too lazy and partly because he looks like what happens when lightning strikes a pile of twinkies and exposed wiring and somehow brings them to life.  She was sent here for the same reason as Kurt and Kitty: to keep her off the board and set up her return here. It’s one of Claremont’s strengths to me: While he ocasionally forgets a subplot or dosen’t realize how wonky one is, more often than not he knows where the story is going and has a plan for it, and thus set up Excalibur a year in advance in the pages of Mutant Massacre. 

Speaking of setup there’s one final thing to cover before we begin, the second X-Men crossover event and the one that directly leads into this: Fall of The Mutants, aka one of the worst days in the life of one Kitty Pryde. First her best friend and human google translate Doug Ramsey died while on a misson with the new mutants, sacrificing himself to save the life of his girlfriend Wolfsbane. 

As if someone was challenging god to make her days worth, at the same time as this tragedy the X-Men, at the time made up of Storm, Wolverine, Psylocke, Rouge, Havok, Dazzler, Longshot and with tag along Madeline Piror whose story is too much to get into here, were locked in a battle with force of chaos and actual demon Nemisis, a being summoned by their sorta ally Forge by accident. Forge can also build any device he pleases but since every fifth x-men character has magic ruin their life, someone had to take the bullet caked with demon blood. At any rate the only way to stop him.. 9 souls were part of the ritual that brought Nemisis in, 9 souls were needed for the ritual to seal him up. And the X-Men, being true heroes determined to do whatever it took, gladly offered up their lives to defeat the demon and save the world. As the world looked on, the X-Men died, for once not feared and hated, but honored and mourned as heroes. Of course this being a comic book Forge’s method of saving the world was turning the X-Men into pure soul energy and throwing them at the demon but that somehow makes it more epic. And of course, it’s no suprise one of their dearest friends was watching from Muir Island, which was serving as a recovery ward for the surviviors of the massacre and was run by longtime X-Men Ally and lynchpin of Hickman’s run Moira Mactaggert

Thankfully, Kitty got one tiny sliver of sunshine on the worst day of her life: Kurt woke up from his coma... just in time to tell him the only family he’d ever known is dead. And that’s where we pick up, with our two heroes trying to figure out what to do now they’ve lost everything. But before we FINALLY get started, this bit was way longer than I meant it to be, your probably curious how long the X-Men stayed dead as well.. this is comics and they were the hottest team int he world. This wasn’t going to stick even if Claremont was serious about ending the series. And the answer, and i’m not making this up I counted, is two pages. Yup, TWO PAGES. Not kidding. Ironically enough Roma, the omniversal goddess daughter of merlin I mentioned, got wrapped up in all this and, moved by the X-Men’s bravery, gave them the chance to come back and start over however they like, and the X-Men choose to be unable to be picked up on tape and let the world think they were dead so they could strike back at their mounting enemies. Granted I feel that while the “play dead and take out our worse foes while we have the advantage” is a good part of it, not telling the new mutants or kitty and kurt is not only cruel, but just paints a target on a bunch of teenagers backs. Sure teenagers who’ve faced worse but still. But I digress, that’s a rant for when I cover Fall of the Mutants at some point and this exposition has taken far longer than I wanted it to. And so here we are at the one shot that would forge a team and finally, we can get into it:  The cover, way up there is decent. It shows a nice right melee between Excalibur, the Warwolves and the Technet, though it makes it look like Gatecrasher is part of the team when she is in fact one of the issue’s main antagonist and is overall a bit weirdly composed. It doesn't help the proper Excalibur #1 has one of the best x-team covers of all time. 

As you can see the comparison dosen’t help the far messier above cover. It’s just average in comparison to the creative and funny covers Davis would provide throughout both runs and the majestic one above.  WE open on Kitty Pryde, understandably, having a nightmare, being dragged by a crew of makeup people just off screen and smack into

Oh good marvel’s already working on the new X-Men movie. Thank god I thought they really WERE going to take 5 years to do it. Naturally she is curious why their in hollywood but dosen’t suspect fowl play because well... to put it in a personal persepctive if I saw my grandpa I lost a few years ago or my dog I lost in high school that was the same age as me, alive healthy and back, i’d be confused as hell but mostly? I’d just be relived and hope beyond hope it was real, as poor Kitty is diong. Unfortunatley the illusion something isn’t up lasts all about a panel before this happens. 

First of all: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!. Second. as AHHHHHH! as it is.. it could’ve been worse. 

It soon becomes clear something is up as Kitty wails around confused, wondering why Rouge’s powers don’t work and why the X-Men are acting as if nothing is real before action is called and they run off.. it’s then Kitty finally encounters a freindly face. 

It's now from context clear just what the fuck is going on: this isn't JUST a dream: Rachel has somehow dragged Kitty into Mojoworld through her dreams, warning her, as seen above that with the X-Men gone, their image can be twisted and exploited by those wanting to use it for their own image. This warning is cut short when Fake Xavier starts shouting and soon we get this lovely image.

As we can see Rachel deeply regrets running but Mojo won't let her go.. fortunatley Kitty phases the chains and lets Rachel go, with Rachel promising to see kitty again soon as she flees.. unfortunatley Kitty's pissed off Mojo's actors...

Again, it could’ve been worse. 

Kitty wakes up and naturally angsts a bit over that fucked up dream she had and then sees a phoenix in the sky, wondering what could it mean and what could the dream mean. 

A lot to unpack here. First off... Perverso...

Second, my heart breaks at that last line.. and it’s true. Kitty likely feels, like a lot of people going through grief, that  maybe they could’ve done something. Maybe if she was there she could’ve stopped their deaths and saved the day or failing that, she could’ve gone with them. So she wouldn’t have to feel awful about being here while they aren’t, so she wouldn’t feel the unbearable weight of being one of the last X-Men. But the sad truth is, she wouldn’t of made any diffrence. None of them would’ve taken the last slot and would’ve given it instead to their tagalong Madeline Prior so she could see her family again. They died selfilesly, and nothing she could’ve done would’ve stopped them. 

As seen above Kitty tries to take solace in petting her dragon Lockheed. Yes Kitty has a dragon for those who didn’t know about him or were only familiar with her from the cartoons.. though why X-Men Evolution never thought to introduce Lockheed is beyond me. He’s a space dragon that stowed away when the X-Men returned from well.. space, and saved Kitty’s life, taking up residence as her pet. He was later revealed to be far more sapient than he seems, but still hangs around Kitty because it’s an effed up world, but it’s a two player game.  But as demonstrated Kitty’s powers have inverted. While she has gotten better, as I talked about in my Mauraders #1 review she was fading from existance shortly after the massacre, her intangiable state is now her natural one. She has to concenrate to turn solid. So in addition to having lost just about everything, her powers are broken too. Kitty then sees a picture of her shortly after she joined the X-Men before having a good cry about how most of the people in the picture are dead and professor xavier got shot up into space. Thankfully he dosen’t have to watch cheesy movies.. unless it’s Cho’d turn to pick the movie. For some reason it’s ALWAYS Cool as Ice. no one knows why. 

Meanwhile, in the seas of mood whiplash, we meet Meggan. Meggan, like most of the cast, is a mutant, something I was unaware of until now even though the I just thought she was some sort of magical creature, but no, she’s a mutant and the naration outright calls her one. I’m just stupid or thought they just classifed her wrong I guess. Unlike most mutants, who manifest powers at puberty, she manifested hers at birth. Megan is an empathic shapeshifter, basically meaning that she shifts based on those around her’s perception of her. And sadly her upbringing was not a happy one as, since she was born with fur, her parents saw her as a monster and left her in a caravan alone, with the rest of her romani community making up rumors about her.. and due to being unable to control her powers shape shifted into the monster they thought she was. She was raised on televisoin and thus has a rather naive sense of the outside world, and later bonded with brian after he took her in, her home having been destroyed due to lots of stuff I don’t have time to go into, and she later took up her current default form after realizing she was a shapeshifter in the first place.  But yes our bubbly shapeshifter is swimming with the dolphins and due to her emphatic ablites, she can commuincate with them learns how to swim like them and, thanks to her ablities, has shifted to do so the best. She’s lost track of time though and heads home to the lighthouse she and Brian live in. She returns home to find the place ransacked, and since she didn’t feed her mogwii after midnight.. this time, she searches for the cause.. and the cause turns out to be similar to the reason Kitty is crying her eyes out miles away in scotland. 

When Kitty and Kurt lost their surrogate family, Brian lost his too. As stated far above Betsy was his sister, and they were very close from the looks of it, and the loss of her naturally shattered the man. Meggan tries to comfort him but.. it goes  about as well as you’d expect, especially since Brian has been heavily drinking on top of his grief. 

This scene.. is really damn sad but really well written. Brian, as I joked in the teaser, has the powers of superman basically minus the add ons like heat vision and frost breath.. yet he couldn't save Betsy. But as Meggan accuratley puts things, he couldn’t of known she was in danger and she was a grown woman. As I said, she choose to sacrifice herself, and as I didn’t fill in, the spell only works with WILLING participants. All that would’ve changed had he gone is Madelyne Prior would be alive and not him. And it’s things like this that also made me take such umbrage with the X-Men faking their deaths: their causing, real genuine greif to people... while I joked mildly about the telpathy thing, i’m not sure betsy’s range, I AM sure that being a telepath one of the simpliest trick is masking your presence. It’d take a lot of effort and be mildly invasive, but keeping yourself hidden to tell your brother goodbye is hardly more morally grey than faking your death and leaving him in a drunken stupor. This is especailly bad once they get a teleporter shortly into their australian stay, as Gateway could SEND HER to him, with no risk of detection, and have her explain it in person with storm in tow. Instead they hurt their friends and loved ones for a plan that ultimatley didn’t quite pan out. 

Meggan herself mopes for a second, understandable as Betsy was her friend too and she's hurt she's gone and blames herself.. before snapping out of it, realizing that Brian is just lashing out and needs help, but unable to face him like he is, she leaves him a pictoral note, since she's functionally illiterate, and goes to get advice from Kitty and Kurt, wanting to help him open up the way he helped her do the same. Meanwhile...

Jesus christ this comic loves abrupt tonal shifts.. but yeah Kurt is excercising, but then reflexively teleports after he takes a hit. As  I mentioned earlier Kurt’s teleporting is strained, having gotten injured in a battle with Nimrod, who really hickman you couldn’t of come up with either a better name or a reason he’s called that when you brought him back in House and Powers?, and as a result comaed himself defeating one of the mauraders. And while the coma thing cleared up nicely his powers are still a fraction of what they once were and one teleport while injured no less leaves him too shaky to continue and reaching for the saftey panel. Thankfully Kitty phases through it while checking up on him, having been told through the island’s backup alarms that he was doing this borderline suicidal shenanigan. Kitty naturally lays into him over it. 

Kitty's rage is entirely warranted: She just lost her surrogate family and her best friend. Things with her parents are strained. She dosen't want to loose the only family she really has left because he feels the same things she feels and is nearly killing himself to try and deal with it. Kurt apologizes, admitting the painful part of it: that he was HAPPY when he woke up from his coma, overjoyed to finally be alive again, to live again.. only to find out his family is dead from one of his closest friends. And with this i'm reminded of Steven Universe.. just go with me. There Pearl mourned for a good decade about loosing Rose because well.. she was everything she had. She , literally and metaphorically, freed her, she was her world.. and Rose moved on to someone else romantically and then decided to up and leave the mortal coil. Her entire world left her and she had no idea to cope or as she put it in song, "Who am I now in this world without her?" That's what our heroes are dealing with: for Kitty and Kurt the X-Men were their world.. not in such a co-dependent way as rose but for Kurt, it was his family: through them he went from a monster in the world's eyes, hiding from it and tired of having to do so, to a bold hero who refused to hide who he was anymore and who had family and a purpose. For young Kitty, she found parental figures in a time when her actual parents, particularly her dad, were going through a messy divorce, found strength she never knew to the point she EARNED her right to stay on the X-Men after Xavier started a junior class and wanted her to go there, and really came of age. The X-Men made them who they are today and without them.. just who are they? But before they can dive into that themselves our heroes find out something disturbing: they had the same exact dream about rachel, complete with helping her escape. Maybe they really did or maybe it was just a warning, the conculsion our heroes reach, and while Kitty does resolve to do something about it, determining that just because their injured dosen’t mean they’ve stopped being X-Men, but before they can deal with this they get a guest. 

No but she’s just as weird and abrubt:

This is Gatecrasher,  leader of the The Technet, a group of interdimensional mercenaries and bounty hunters. She wants to speak with the lady of the house but that’s not really and option as she’s kinda on a schedule. You know people to grab, drinks to be drunks, sapient racoons to bone.. that sorta thing.. and the last one isn’t something I pulled out of nowhere the recent Rocket Racoon solo not only brought in the technet but had her fancy the guy. Guess it’s the fuzzy, as Kurt himself will tell you chicks dig the fuzzy. It’s why he’s Krakoa’s orgy meister. Before Kitty and Kurt can find out who Gatecrasher is and why she’s here, Meggan soars in.. and hisses at Gatecrasher. See The good captain and the Technet have a history: they’ve been both enemies and reluctant allies, so naturally Meggan is worried their here for Brian. But this time they have no buisness with the good Captain... and when asked by kitty why she’s here Gatecrasher uses a telecom crystal, some sort of magic hologram recording, to explain herself:

Saturnyne is , as she says an omniversal majestrix. This basically means she runs the day to day operations of the Captain Britan Corps, basically the Captain Britians for every reality, helps give underdeveloped words nudges toward advancment and general multiversal maintince stuff. Sorta like a combination of Omnitraxus and Hekapoo from star vs the forces of evil but without being a racist asshole. I mean she’s still an asshole, just not a racist one. She and Brian have a romantic history. As you can also see each of the team is having a different reaction to her: Kurt is popping a boner just off screen, maybe he can invite her to Krakoa orgy night hmm?, Meggan is pissed because she and Brian were a thing once, and Kitty just found out she likes ladies AND she likes guy. What i’m saying is it dosen’t take an intellectual to get that she’s bisexual. And yes I know she turned down Karma off screen later on but that was A) the result of another writer changing things after the previous writer on both character, Chris Claremont himself, apparently had sizeable ship tease for them. and B) if her ex boyfriend iceman can be retconned to have been a heavily closeted until very recently gay man this whole time, Kitty can also have been sticking to the closet or just simply have not explored that side if we want. Anyways it turns out there here for rachel at Saturnyne’s orders, because she’s apparently a theat to the multiverse.. not too much of a stretch when in one reality her mom going dark phoenix destroyed damn near everything and even here the phoenix force has snuffed out entire galaxies. She’s apparently on her way back to earth, and it’s the Technet’s job to catch her. As for the specifics.. Gatecrasher has no idea. And frankly when an omniversal goddess asks you go fetch someone for what I assume is a yak that has a comparentment in it’s back with millions of dollars stashed inside,  you don’t really care. Kitty being Kitty, refuses to help her find their friend and until she knows more, she’s willing to fight her on it. Unfortunatley, as you can probably tell, Gatecrasher wasn’t dumb enough to go after a being that can eat an entire solar system alone. 

It's here we meet the Technet proper and a fight between two former teammates, a shapeshifter they only just now met and who only Kurt recognized, and a team of weird as shit but highly trained bounty hunters goes about as well as the classic matchup of Wolverine vs "Anyone trying to get between him and his beer stash". Kitty is quickly taken out by the yellow girl with green hair, scatterbrain, whose power is.. just that: anyone she touches has their brain go all spacey and weird and kitty knocks herself out falling over when Scatter shuts her thinky parts off. And as for Meggan..

This is Bodybag. And his power is exactly what it looks like: he gulps people up and then keeps them in his sack on the back. It’s weird but i’ts my kind of creative weird and it makes sense for a team of bounty hunters to have a member to store their quarrry. Kurt wisely BAMF’s the fuck out of there, but Gatecrasher decides not to persue him: He’s not their target, and if he wants his friends he’ll have to come back for them anyway, so it’s not like chasing him all over is really worth the effort. She does have Bodybag snag kitty though, and plans to use her and Meggan as bargaining chips. 

Meanwhile Rachel finally returns to the story, as seen above a bit discombobulated given you know, she just crossed dimensions or whatever hapepned. She then ends up at a charity masqurade party , just poofying out of nowhere and when she tries to you know, leave...

I just... what the fuck kind of charity event IS this? The chains she brought with her but “no one leaves without permisson. “ I just... THIS IS A CHARITY BALL NOT VIETNAM. And who, besides racist assholes, thinks holdiing someone down with chains is a good idea. Just WHAT IS THIS SCENE. Thankfully we get some other party crashers. 

These are Warwolves, a new, as far as I can tell, creation and basically Mojo’s literal hunting dogs. Rachel tries fighting them off but naturally, their Psi-Proof so just blasting them with telekenisis won’t work and uses the objects around her, including her own chains to duck them. But she mutters what’s the point it’s just another sound stage.. except as I said, it isn’t. She’s in foggy london town. 

Rachel continues her run through the urban jungle eventually ending up in a subway. No not the restraunt, she’s not that unlucky. Duckign onto a train one of the warwolves globs on. 

To be fair most hollywood contracts are basically slavery, but Rachel as a point.. she was basically tricked into singing it, again not exactly uncommon, and refuses to take this bullshit.

This bit is awesome, and doubly so as I left out a bit of Rachel's backstory on purpose earlier: she was a hound. Basically it meant she was enslaved and conditioned to hunt down other mutants, only escaping shortly before days of future past happened and then escsaping into the present. So naturally the thought of being enslaved and forced to do some asshole's bidding again, to loose her free will? She'll die before that happens and slaughters the warwolf to prove it.. though also scares her fellow passangers in the process. While Rachel tries to explain thing the warwolves greeve.. and Teleporter, Gatecrasher's lizard thing, has located Rachel. Meanwhile Madison is grappling with the fact that not every issue can be settled by comittee... Meanwhile Kurt arrives at the Lighthouse to find Brian stinking of booze and asleep, so he decides to do the only logical thing he can think of. 

I fucking love you Kurt. So since Godzilla is too busy at his tax audit to save him from the depths of the ocean Brian wakes up himself pissed and assuming someone tried to kill him. Which granted Kurt outright admitted he might drown but given the only two friends he has left in the world and an innocent he just met who fought beside him despite having no reason to besides it being the right thing are in mortal peril, he has no time to play nice. Kurt’s responses to Brian’s outrage are fucking amazing. 

Fucking brutal and accurate: Brian’s alcoholism is killing him and is just as borderline suicidal as Kurt’s play session with largely the same intention. Kurt has no time for wallowing in self pity, no time to baby Brian, as much as it might be warranted, through his grief. Kurt Wagner needs a hero, and since the avengers and fantastic four would likely take hours he dosen’t have, Brian is his best bet at saving his friends.  He has no time for pity or sadness, he only has time to save what he has left. He explains the situation to Brian as well as how the hell he found him: since he at least knew of Brian, likely due to Betsy as she was staying with the X-Men prior to joining and just before the massacre, he dug up the X-Men’s file on him and spent the rest of his time getting to him. Brian is, unsurprisingly, in no real mood to help and mopes that there’s really no point in it… and that’s when Kurt somehow gets even more pissed  off and 20 times as awesome, with a speech worthy of Sir Patrick Stewart himself.

And as I’ve made abundantly clear that’s the point of this story: The X-Men’s temporary death was unfair, left a lot of pain in their wake and left our heroes scrambling to figure out where do they go from here? And it’s here Nightcrawler is the first besides Meggan, whose simple world view means it was a lot easier to process things and took her three panels to get herself in gear to help Brian, to really turn a corner on his grief. He’s sad his friends are dead, he wishes more than anything that he could’ve died a hero like them instead of living with the misery and sorrow of them being gone.. but he’s alive. And he’s going to honor them the best he can by being the kind of man they wanted him to be. And to me this is why Kurt became leader: out of the five he has the most experience,  with only Brian rivaling him in that, but also the most drive. He may of lost everything, but by god he’s going to keep moving. Sure his friends died, it’s the risk of the trade.. but they’d want him to live, to take up the sword and keep  fighting so that the dream dosen’t fade out. It’s why, as much as I don’t agree with it, they kept hteir resurrection a secret: because the safety of all mutants, of their friends, is more important than one man. And Kurt is going to honor that. But not before giving Brian another verbal bitchslapping.

Of course it’s not easy as Brian DID die to become captain britan.. and the memory haunts him. And he wonders when it’ll come from him.. and he’s afraid of it. But the question is will he let his fear of the reaper swallow him whole or live like Kurt, fighting on anyways. To truly live.

Meanwhile Rachel is the only member of the forming team to not have had a full on mope sesh so she gets on that, but it only lasts for about a panel and like most of the angst in this comic is warranted: Rachel comptemplates if she should go back to the X-Men.. but realizes despite running out on them , their family, and she has no other options. But before she can learn the truth the technet are upon her and bodybag scoops her up. Gatecrasher plans to release Kitty and Meggan and one thing I like that I hadn’t noticed in previous reads is Gatecrasher is a fairly intresting antagonist. She’s not “evil”, she’s just a merc wanting a payday, and in this case was hired by a legitmate if pompus source. While she takes Kitty and Meggan, it’s more out of pragmatisim and as noted she plans to release the two when she could’ve let Bodybag digest them, and when first showing up is perfectly cordial to Kurt and Kitty, and only fights when it’s clear our heroes won’t let her just walk off with their old friend. It makes me glad there’s far more of her and the technet to come as the series goes on and a ton more in Alan Davis run when I get to that. Their intresting characters with unique power sets and inject a sense of fun into what would otherwise be a fairly dreary story.  Anyways before she can do that the warwolves strike and are too dumb to know when to quit so a fight breaks out and Gatecrasher beats the piss out of one while Kurt arrives, watching from  the shadows. As for why no one’s spotted him... i’ts simple: One of his powers is to blend into shadows. It’s not used often and it’s forgotten quite a bit, but it is one he’s used on ocasion and even IF Claremont just retconned it out, his foes are too busy to notice. Kurt once again shows how awesome he is and tricks one of the wolves into slashing the bags containing his friends open. Gross but oh so triumphant. 

Unfortunatley his victory is short lived: Meggan and Kitty are still woozy as, while I didn’t mention this earlier, Bodybags bags contain a paralyzing goop so they still aren’t quite ready to fight and while Rachel is, she can’t psy zap the dog. Luckily for Kurt gatecrasher yanks it away. Unluckily, she prepares to beat him into furry blue chunklets on the ground. Luckily...

Brian has finally gotten his shit together to save the day.. for all of a panel…

While Brian is fighting who or whatever that is Rachel and Kitty try to get into things but are blindsided by ringtoss and joyboy whose powers well...

Yeah while ringtoss, if still weird isn’t TOO out of the ordinary for Marvel, Joyboy seems like he’s some sorta lost Jojo’s bizarre adventure stand. It’s also another reason to love the technet as again, their powers are just so fucking creative and weird. But that’s also what makes them such a threat: Their powers aren’t what most heroes usually deal with, and thus they have the element of surprise, helped by the fact their all from separate dimensions, meaning even in space, where their likely more ready for nonsense, they still have the upper hand by being races most space peeps aren’t ready for. Speaking of not ready,w ehave two last members to cover... 

They speak for themselves, and while they do so Brian tries to rescue Meggan but is stopped by scatterbrain. Nightcrawler notices their asses are getting kicked and figures out WHY: The Warwolves and The Technet are teams. They work together regularly. Excalibur at this point is three former teammates in a disorienting situation and two british persons they just met. And if they don’t’ start working together they aren’t going to last. So Nightcrawler decides to fix that by knocking a warwolf into Ringtoss, who then collapses into waxwork whose touch takes out both and leaves Rachel free. Rachel quickly takes out Joyboy and with him out of the way, Kitty and Kurt can focus on Gatecrasher:

And with that Gatecrasher knows when to fold em and teleports the team away to fight another day, while the Warwolves slinked off in the confusion. Both will be back, obviously, but for now our heroes have one, Brian and Meggan make up and make out, and with the chaos settled Kitty, Rachel and Kurt have a tearful reunion.  

Our heroes celebrate with a campfire and memories of their fallen comrades, with Rachel admitting she’s not sure what’s real or not after her experiences with Mojo. Brian prepares to leave and take care of the Warwolves himself.. but Rachel objects. The three others don’t have lives to return to, and just because the X-Men are gone dosent’ mean Xaviers dream should die out, likening them to the symbol of King Arthurs sword Excalibur. Kitty and Kurt start to agree, pointing out their dream taught them that if theirs a vacuum left in the X-Men’s legacy, someone will use it for their own ends. Rachel affirms her reasons for staying as a team, saying she’s tired of running: She’s done so all her live and she wants to , for once, stand for something. Meggan, having had similar problems in the past, agrees with her and the rest of the crew quickly come on board and thus we close on this image as a new team, and a new legacy, is forged: Excalibur is born.

Final Thoughts: The Sword is Forged is an utter classic and a great way to start things off. Our heroes are established, Rachel, who I felt was a bit thrown around by the plot during her time on the X-Men, is fleshed out a bit more and given purpose while Brian and Meggan are decently introduced to the audience. My only real complaints is that Davis and Claremont sometimes forget that American audiences won’t know who half these people are and while they introduce the Technet and Saturnyne well enough, they still never backtrack to explain them better later and what history I DID get I had to dig up for myself online. That aside the story, while having a lot of angst, is well done and has a good flow to it and ends on a high note, the characters are likeable enough, the villains are all creative though the Warwolves feel slight next to the Technet and will get fleshed out a bit more in the series proper. And of course I’d be a moron if I didn’t compliment Alan Davis wonderful art, which captures the whimsical tone well, the emotion in certain scenes perfectly and holds up beautifully years later. Overall The Sword is Forged is a great team origin story and if you liked what you saw here I’d recommend checking it out. Next time, hopefully tonight, we finally get to to the new Excalibur as Brian and his sister and thrust into the shit and a new Captain Britain is born. Until then, courage.

[xuanelle]

sometimes I want to talk more about comics on twitter because there are a lot of comics fans there then I go on twitter and see the worst comic takes I've ever seen in my life and remember why I don't

[cgbcomics]

[comicwaren]

From U.S.Avengers #007, “Wake Up The Kraken, Unleash The Heat”

Art by Paco Medina, Juan Vlasco and Jesús Aburtov

Written by Al Ewing

[comicbooktradingcards]

Character Spotlight | Captain Britain | Part 1

[margokesses]

what annoys me about the whole Captain America twitter account is the people under the tweet being like 'oh its just promotion don't get defensive' but where was the promotion when it was Sam? the account wasn't changed in 2019 after Endgame even though we knew he was taking up the shield, it wasn't even changed to promote his own show this year, it was changed what a week after it ended? What If...? isn't even out yet and its already been changed? how is that fair?

I'm also sick of seeing Peggy Carter on my screen as well tbh but you can't say that without getting a load of shit

Side tangent - I have an icky feeling that after the show finishes we're going to be overloaded with "Captain Carter" merch when all we got for TFATWS was the title card slapped onto a t shirt that I could probably make myself

No you're right!! Like I'm p sure they changed the account to sam the weekend his episode aired. But even then there wasn't many tweets/promo with it.

And now they wanna promote the hell out of peggy carter when they could explore so much more other possibilities?? This show is literally about expanding the multiverse and they wanna bring back someone who's story as already ended?? Give me a faiza hussain story!! Give me an Isaiah bradley story!! Give me a sharon carter story!! They could literally be doing anything else with the captain america/britan storyline!! Its not just peggy!!

Send me asks

[kurtty-drabbles]

Pirate au Redone (Part 4)

N/A: I think I´ll have to make a bonus part of this au later. This was a challenge to do and I hope I got it right.

@djinmer4 @dannybagpipesarecalling @bamfoftheundead @everykurt @muninandhugin

The ship has the name " Sesame" in big letter and font very eye-appealing and one lonely woman is watching the sky- seeing the birds flying by near the ship/yacht completely oblivious to the inner turmoil she carries in regards her new life- and the contemplation only stops when the Captain of the ship sits next to her offering her a drink-nothing alcoholic as she promised with a mischievous smile and a wink- and replies. "How life is treating so far, Kwannon?" and the Japanese woman has to pound this question for a minute or two.

"Captain Pryde" she humors the other woman even if she knows that pirates, well, real pirates, don´t have a yacht or aren´t so heroic as she´s lead to believe. "I have issues with Krakoa but I´m also ...thankfully for that abomination...look" she gestures her own hands and Captain Pryde follows the motion with her eyes calmly. "I´ve my body back...I´m not dead nor in some white woman´s body. I´m me again and ...this makes me think..." she trails off and Kitty Pryde encourages her to speak freely.

"I was born with nothing, I die with nothing and now I don´t even have the ''nothing'' anymore...Kitty, does God truly exist, or is this all a cosmic joke for him or her?" Kwannon question plug´s Kitty heart and she can remember a certain mutant who aside from loving piracy (among other things) and whose faith was something Kitty and him could talk freely-even through both have different religions it was also covered with a deeper respect for each other- and Kitty only answeres "I believe there is a God or even Gods...but, trying to understand them is a null point"

Kwannon nods but doesn´t seem to be a topic well- answered for her, yet, she´s gracious enough to change the topic. " You think we can trust her...of all people?" and Kitty narrow her eyes.

"Are you going to call her the pretender?"

"No...I´m just unsure of what to feel about her"

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Getting the title of the sorceress supreme from Dr. Strange is not something that will give any dark pleasure- Dr. Strange was a friend, if nothing else, and while his taste for women can be questionable at best, there´s no real pleasure in getting his tittle now- and Wanda Maximoff donning herself with the famous crimson cape is in agreement with its new master.

Tommy and Billy are working with her-Billy return from the space to learn his "twin" not only is working in a magic school but has some small traces of magic, and Billy, only respond by hugging his twin until the other threats to curse him for all eternity- and her magic school is now a real vision(sometimes, Wanda chuckles at this word. Sometimes, Wanda cries) with demons kids from Limbo and other parts of the globe or planes wanting safe heaven to learn magic.

The X-men used to be like that...or am I wrong?

The Sesame´s flag is in view and Wanda shakes her nostalgia away ("let the past in the past, Wanda") and is there watching as Captain Pryde is present and the one who is making an effort to go talk with Wanda-the rest of the crew looks unsure, she de-powered them not too long ago and not everyone is forgiving nor forgiving means friendship- and the two woman are now facing each other.

"You really are here..." Wanda´s tone is laced with surprise as she watches the yacht on the port and back to the captain. "Afraid of me?" she asked still impressed.

"I´m really here...Am I afraid of you? No, not really Wanda...Yet, I can´t ignore M day, I´d not blame you...in the full extension the others do...you were out of your mind and others try to take advantage...still, I won´t call you the pretender or any shit like that" Kitty responds with honest and while she´s never one to use swear words- and is something Terry Pryde installed on her since a young age- she feels this is an appropriate moment to use it.

Wanda only nods at her words. It is much better than she was expecting or hoping for. "Do you really want to do this? Krakoa isn´t supposed to be a paradise to all mutants?" 

"The paradise is more for horror island than anything else...and while I think Utopia is still a pretentious name...is better than a cult on an alive island...Can you help us, Scarlet Witch?" Kitty asked sincerely now. Nothing is bounding Scarlet Witch to do this task.

Wanda closes her eyes and opens with now crimson. "I´m Scarlet Witch for a reason...and I´m sorry...for what the Avengers did"

"Apologies from them mean next to nothing"

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Kurt Wagner noticed the absence of Logan, Scott, Jean, and even Ororo and is surrounded by people who in the past-and, not a too long past- were his enemies. Looking at Apocalypse gazing at him with wraith in his eyes mixed with envy does make his stomach rumble. Prof X is speaking and to be frankly, Kurt is not interested in listening any more.

"This is a cult!" Kurt shouts ignoring Raven´s look- the woman may have given birth to him, but, she´s far from being a mother in any sense- and looks in disgust to the villains on the quiet council. "There´s only villains here. What type of paradise is this?"

And Prof X put an uncanny smile on his face-still wearing that helmet and Magneto is close by. As always- as he speaks in a leery way. "And that wouldn´t make you a villain as well? I know...I know what you did in some other universes. Nate may have used you as an avatar to live his wet dream, but, in other realities, you make you with a woman in front of your dead daughter´s cold corpse" and show the image to Kurt who denies this as being a trick.

"I´m not a monster. I´m not like this. I´m Kurt Wagner...and I refuse to be on this island" and tries to attack Prof X and is only meet with vines wrapped around his waist.

"Do you miss Kitty Pryde that much or are you just lonely?" Prof X sounds different now. "Because...I never thought you´re worth her time" and his golden eyes watch as each member on the clan is nothing more but vines. And Krakoa has made her decision to reject Kurt.

Sesame managed to fish Kurt Wagner with a bit help of luck- Kurt opens his golden eyes to see Kitty Pryde staring at him with a myriad of expressions. Concern is one of them- and Kurt breaks down crying as Kitty only hugs him.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Doug Ramsey is not one to think of himself as a James Bond type of spy or archetype, yet, Captain Britain aka Betsy counts on him and Doug wants to do something, anything to help his fellow mutants. Doug uses his power unashamed and telepathically calls Betsy.

"We have to take as many mutants we can..." his eyes are watching the scene incredulous. "That story of Dr. Moira being a mutant? Well...is fake as much everything else in this island" and the call ends with Doug looking at the clones of every single X-men and the versions of Dr. Moira...It has the words written "the last clone" and it sends a shiver to his spine as the clone opens her eyes and speaks one line.

"I´m a mutant, just like you" and the others continue to do so.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Queen Lilandra is looking at the New Mutants with a stoic expression enrobing her face and body language as well- The X-men aren´t enemies, per se, but aren´t allies and Queen Lilandra has a daughter she wants to prevent the X-men to ever meet- and Karma is the one to break the silence again.

"Where is Pheonix?"

"What do you mean? Pheonix has never left Earth...."

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Captain Britan and the Neo Excalibur are working to smuggle as many mutants they can from Krakoa- Doug can only calm the island for so long as he repeats his words to Neo Excalibur-and Rogue and Remy are running from the time. "Are they the real thing or ..." Rogue will later wonder if she jinxed this rescue mission as a good part of the mutants rescued...turned into green goo.

And Betsy takes a whiff in the air and screams. "Fire!" and Neo Excalibur runs away in their ship as Rogue can swear the shape of the fire is similar to...

No...it can´t be...

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Madeline Pryor concludes her tale many days ago, yet, still feels as if is lingering on Scott and Jean´s mind and Jean is the one not taking the news well-the resistance against Krakoa is ever surprised to see Jean and Madeline in a semi civil way- as the New Mutants confirm Madeline´s tale and everything else.

"So...this is all because I´m a bad mother?" Jean asked almost laughing -not a joyful one, rather one devoid of any positive emotion- and Madeline is not taking pity on Jean.

"Is a way to see things...Look, I´m not the greatest example either...Nate became a monster" Madeline´s expression softened a little. She can feel sorry for Meggan if nothing else-she, among all the members of the resistance, can understand how cruel truly is when someone takes your ability to do anything for their own gain- and she continues not bothering to look at Jean. "You thought Nate as your own and ignored your own daughter...yet, Scott is the only one who seems to still remember her"

Jean says nothing as she watches Scott and Kitty talk -whatever is about Utopia or how to deal with Krakoa is not important right now- and she wonders why she never bothers to check on Rachel Grey.

Thanks to Scarlet Witch, Utopia is back and unlike Krakoa there´s a chance of organic change into a real country-Emma Frost is taking diplomacy like a fish to the water and all the surviving mutants have no more complaints in regards Scarlet Witch, at least, it appears so- and Captain Pryde looks at Nightcrawler who looks still befuddled by everything, yet, refuses to leave Kitty behind.

If Pheonix wants a fight...she´ll get one...but if Rachel wants revenge...can I give this to her?

[thecomicsnexus]

EXCALIBUR #1-2 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 1988 BY CHRIS CLAREMONT, ALAN DAVIS, PAUL NEARY AND GLYNIS OLIVER

SYNOPSIS (FROM MARVEL DATABASE)

In a deserted factory complex near Loch Daemon in the Scottish Highlands, Tweedledope plays around with a small metallic gadget. He fills it with various stuff such as beans, trash and metal and misuses it as a cocktail shaker. When his eyes fall on a wanted poster of the Crazy Gang, he suddenly looses interest in his toy and throws it away. The metallic object opens its eyes and comes to live - it is Widget.

In the meanwhile, Excalibur and the police encounter a hostage situation in London. While Dai Thomas is reluctant to send in young girls like Kitty Pryde or Rachel Summers, Captain Britain reassures him that Excalibur will handle the situation. In the meantime, Kitty and Rachel talk to police officer Ray Mulholland on the rooftop of the building, impressing him with their mutant powers.

The two women then phase through the roof to check out the hostage situation while Mulholland is attacked by a warwolf who kills him and strips him from his skin.

Kitty and Rachel move into a storage room adjacent to the larger room where some hostage-takers hold about 20 people as hostages. Kitty phases her face through the wall, telepathically reporting details about the layout of the room. Suddenly, Rachel suffers a seizure and looses her consciousness - exactly in the same moment as Ray Mulholland gets killed by the warwolf. Her scream alarms the hostage-takers and they search the storage room for any intruders, discovering the unconscious body of Rachel and dragging her into the main room. Kitty utilizes a white blanket to dress up as a ghost and phases through the main room ceiling, howling and threatening the confused hostage-takers. One of the men shoots at her with a pump gun but doesn't hit her due to her phased status.

Alarmed by the shot, Captain Britain, who waited on the outside, decides to storm the building. Rachel, suddenly awakened, releases the Phoenix and disarms the hostage takers, rendering them unconscious by smashing them against a wall. When Captain Britain enters the scene, Kitty and Rachel already dealt with the situation. Merchant Banker Nigel Frobisher approaches Rachel and offers her to "express his gratitude more privately" - an offer which disgusts Rachel. She is still confused about her seizure and tells her teammates that she felt a despairing psychic scream of a person who seems to be entirely erased from existence without even leaving a mind trace.

Back in Merlin Mews, Rachel feels the same sensation again when Jacko Petrie is killed and skinned by a warwolf disguised as police officer Ray Mulholland.

One night later in Merlin Mews, Kitty mourns over the pictures of the X-Men and her friend Doug Ramsey who are supposed to be dead after the Mutant Massacre. She remembers some of the fiercest enemies she and the X-Men opposed over the years and is interrupted by Captain Britain who tries to cheer her up. He invites her to join her on a trip into town, but she refuses because she is working on a secret device she calls the "Doppelgänger Module".

On the west coast of England, Meggan and Nightcrawler fly to Brian Braddock's lighthouse. Meggan suggests that Excalibur could use it as a secret Headquarter and shows Nighcrawler around in a kind of sightseeing tour. He is impressed by the location. While Meggan makes some tea in the kitchen, he encounters a strange vision in a storage room where he is attacked by alien species. In the nick of time, he teleports out of the room and back into the kitchen, but when he wants to show Meggan what he just saw, the storage room is empty.

In London, Rachel accompanies Captain Britain to Fraser's Bank at Thameside where she is approached by Nigel Frobisher again. She is distracted by a telepathic message from Meggan and Kurt, announcing that they will return to London tonight, and Frasier uses this moment to touch her. Rachel pushes him away with her Phoenix power, watched by an amused Captain Britain. He is startled by the entrance of a blonde woman he immediately recognizes as Courtney Ross, his former girlfriend, who is now the vice president of the bank. They sit down and talk about old times.

In Merlin Mews, Kitty finishes her Doppelgänger Module which will allow her to mask herself as Phoenix by sending out her unique energy pattern. She dresses as Phoenix as well, somewhat uncomfortable with the skintight suit and the high heels, and moves out into the streets of London, planning to draw the warwolves' attention. The warwolves want to capture Phoenix in order to take her back to Mojo, so she hopes they will be lured to her. Meggan and Nightcrawler return to the Mansion, not aware of her departure. Nightcrawler is taking a bath and startled by Meggan who fixed him a mug of hot chocolade.

Returning from the bath, Nightcrawler discovers Kitty's invention in Captain Britains lab. He is immediately alarmed and telephatically calls Rachel, who is currently visiting the Shakespeare Company in London. She leaves the theater and starts searching for Kitty who just met police officer Mulholland and some companions. Mulholland mistakes her for Rachel Summers and he and his companions reveal that they are warwolves. Kitty phases when the first warwolf strikes her, but then her powers get scrambled and she cannot phase back from solid state. The warwolves capture her and drag her away. Phoenix, Meggan, Captain Britain and Nightcrawler appear at the scene, but they cannot stop the warwolves from abducting Kitty. Together they decide that they must rescue her teammate before the enemies turn her into a warwolf.

In a deserted factory complex near Loch Daemon in the Scottish Highlands, Colin McCay plays "tag" with Widget. The boy is hiding from Vixen who payed a lot of money to get the orphaned boy into custody. Vixen's armed troopers search the facility and try to lure the hungry boy with Fish'n Chips. Eventually, they surround the child, but before capturing him, Widget opens a dimensional portal and Colin happily disappears. The soldiers return to Vixen with empty hands.

In the meanwhile, in the London Underground, the Warwolves appear at Hob's End Station, together with the captured Kitty Pryde. They steal some more skins, push a woman onto the rails and disappear into a dark tunnel. The woman's life is threatened by an approaching underground railway, but Captain Britain manages to save her in the nick of time while Rachel stops the train with her telekinetic powers. The civilians celebrate the super heroes, but when Nightcrawler appears at the scene, they get afraid and panic because of his demonic appearance. Eventually, the police enters the station and tries to sort things out. Captain Britan demands that the police officers inform Scotland Yard special agent Dai Thomas, who will vouch for Excalibur. Excalibur is inhibited from following the warwolves into the tunnels until the situation is sorted out. Nightcrawler notices that one police officer shows a very odd behavior - he is smiling to himself and seems to be very amused. The mutant secretly follows him into a tunnel. There he is ambushed by the policeman who turns out to be a warwolf. Nightcrawler is captured and taken into their secret underground headquarter.

In the meantime, Kitty Pryde's kidnappers reach the headquarter. Some warwolves are waiting for new skins and are provided with the latest stolen bodies. One warwolf tries to steal Kitty's skin, but after finishing the procedure, only the skintight Rachel suit is left - no sign of Kitty's body. The other warwolves mock their colleague who becomes quite depressed about the fact that he is the only one without a proper human skin. In the same moment as Kitty's life is at stake, Rachel Summers feels her pain due to their PSI link. She changes into her Phoenix form, leaves the subway station by tearing a big hole into the ceiling, and flies away. The police demands that Captain Britain will pay for the destruction of public property.

In Fraser's Bank, Thamesside, Nigel Frobisher is amusing himself with his secretary when he sees the Phoenix in the sky. He immediately looses his interest in the woman and decides that he and Phoenix are meant for each other. Courtney Ross, who is sitting in her office, reflects about her time with Brian Braddock while watching the Phoenix rising.

Rachel telepathically reports to Captain Britain and Meggan that Nightcrawler was attacked. The two leave the subway station and run into the tunnel in order to find the secret headquarter of the warwolves. In the headquarter, the warwolf who just tried to skin Kitty Pryde, shows a very odd behavior. Another warwolf, carrying the captured Nightcrawler on his back, enters the headquarter and offers him to take the mutant's body instead. The skinless warwolf is disgusted by Wagner's appearance, but his companions force him to take the body without complaint. While trying to suck out Nightcrawler's life, the warwolf suddenly starts beating his comrades and then begins to grow long hair. Soon all warwolves begin to melee with each other while Nightcrawler uses this situation for an escape attempt. He is captured by one of the warwolves, but then Captain Britain and Meggan enter the headquarter and save him from being skinned. Together they defeat all warwolves and capture the one with the long hair who shows a strong resemblance to Kitty. Meggan is confused because her scent is a mix of warwolf and Kitty, but suddenly two human hands open the warwolves mouth from the inside and Kitty Pryde fights her way out of the alien's body. She phased into her opponents body when he tried to kill and skin her while Rachel helped her to keep her conciousness cohesive. From the inside Kitty could control the warwolves' actions and used him to fight the other warwolves.

Excalibur is clueless about what to do with the captured warwolves - they are aliens and can't be arrested or put on trial. Eventually, Exalibur donates the Warwolves to the London Zoo.

REVIEW

While X-Men spin-offs were a plague in the nineties, it is easy to forget they started well. New Mutants, Excalibur and X-Factor were very different from each other.

In this case, we start right were the special left. We get new long arcs and new short ones. The Warwolves look humanoid. I think putting them in a zoo is not a good idea (they could easily escape and blend in).

Apart from that, some story elements are dragging, I assume for good reasons, but make the pace slower. If you are a new reader, there are plenty of support characters that were introduced before the series, and even main ones, that you may not know about. So I don’t think it is new-reader-friendly. I do think that despite that, the story can be understood.

The art looks amazing, it’s classic Davis + Neary.

I give the story a score of 7.

[jaskiersbeloved]

Peggy Carter???? Being the Captain Britan??????? In the "What if..." stories???? YESSSSSSSSS

[popculturebuffet]

Hickman’s X-Men One Year In: Part 2: The Dawn of X

And we’re onto part 2. Since it took me a while to talk about Hickman’s Series outside of Giant-Size and the setup here, that’s in part one if your curious, I split this little retrospective into two parts, with this part here talking about the rest of the books. This isn’t to say they aren’t great, many of them are, it was just easier to do this as a two parter so with HIckman himself out of the way how did his hand picked batch of talented writers handle the lofty status quo he set up?Find out under the cut. Pax Krakoa baby. 

Mauraders Okay just to get this out of the way this is my second faviorite x-book running, after X-Men itself and it often equals it and far and away the best tile of the run and restored my faith in Gerry Duggan.  Duggan is not a bad writer and I blame the messy finish of his otherwise awesome guardians run with infnity wars on marvel trying to cram other characters into it and then a weird mash up idea that while cool, kept the guardians out of their own damn event and from confrting a now mad gamora, but that and deadpool made me forget the guy is a good writer and can do great things. Maruaders however won me back to him with intrest.  A unique concept, the x-men as pirates helping ferry goods to krakoan allied states and ferry trapped mutants from hostile ones, is fucking awesome. The only thing missing is nightcrawler and it’s clear hickman has other plans, though I still feel he shoudl’ve been on the boat as he has both the relation to kitty pryde and pirate pedgree that fit in perfectly.  Speaking of kitty after years of writers misusing her due to having a crush on her as a kid and shoving her into half baked romances with peter quill and her ex peter rasptuin, the latter failing so badly that marvel pulled the plug on their wedding because fans clearly didn’t want it, and battling my own reluctance ot see her front and center again, Duggan makes good use of her again: Kitty is given the unique hook of the portals not working for her and no one, even her old friend Doug after he gets back, being able to figure out WHY. Though I do hope Doug does show up here and explain it more, as him being kitty’s best friend once is rarely brought up since he got back and it’s silly it hasn’t been. But rather than take this on the chin Kitty strikes up a crew consisting of big sister Storm, first class graduate x-man, badass gay and kitty’s friend and ex iceman, bishop who reluctantly joins as her bishop more on that in a second and the best of them by a mile: Pyro. The original, finally brought back and given some intresting backstory: he was the first mutant brought back and felt good about it..t ill he realized that despite sacrificing himself to save a, if your familiar with the various cartoons this will be baffling but trust me, reformed senator kelly as Pyro himself was dying from the legacy virus, only to find out they did him first because they considered him expendable basically and naturally was upset over that, drunk a bunch of the liquor kitty smuggled in, for logan naturally, and passed out and then joined in on the rescue mission that formed the team because why not and stayed because it was a great offer.  Speaking of offers with a new purpose, Kitty accepted her old enemy Emma Frost’s offer to be red queen, which includes a seat on krakoa’s council and was basically emma’s way of saying fuck you to her old cohort who she was forced to bring back on to handle the seedier side of Krakoa’s dealings via his underworld connections, sebastian shaw. Emma is the fincical  backbone of krakoa, having the shipping connections to get the flowers in and out and now having kitty to handle the stuff she can’t and do some of the shipping, as well as again tell Sebastian, who naturally wants both gone and is pissy at Emma being so far ahead of him, wants gone. And while he’s seemingly succeded with kitty I not only have every expectation that while ressuection is failing to work on her she’ll be back, but that trying to murder one of the most beloved x-men whose consdiered family to among others three of krakoa’s captains, bishop after this series, four of their council, five if you include Doug whose best friends with both his left arm which is also a deadly space robot and the very place they live on. The only reason he’s not going to die 80 times in increasingily horrifying ways is because the five can’t take on that kind of workload and one murderous ass beating from half of krakoa and krakoa itself is close enough. 

Emma is easily one of the books best parts, being written back as she should: An anti hero who while quick with a cutting quip, truly cares for her charges, and mutantkind as a whole and has grown from the monster she started as or even the kind of person who’d use a therapy session from a desperate man having issues opening up emotionally after apocalypse used his body as a rental car to convince him to fuck her.  And yes that’s how things started with Scott and Emma and yes it’s really fucked up and yes the story treats it as such, though I still wish Scott would get actual therapy, but as Linkara recently pointed out in his House of M Review the Marvel and DC universes weirdly lack therapists for the most part and thus it was left on my mind the last two weeks.. and yes I know DC tried but when your final product at trying to serious tackle mental health is heroes in crisis.. I award you no points and god have mercy on your soul.  But while Emma and Kitty get the lions share of the focus the rest of the group is enjoyable, well done and intresting, if not given many arcs to themselves, but still have enough character moments to counterballance that. The standout of the rest of the crew is easily Pyro, taken from “why is he still dead despite being super popular and used in a heavy role in X2 that’s garnered fans of that version to this day and bafflement he became a foot note in the next movie and used in every adaptation” to fun side character with a skull on his face and a love of booze and setting things on fire. He’s finally given the respect he deserves sorta and while I hope more is delved into his ressurection angst, he’s a ton of fun and it again makes me wonder why it took 20+ years to bring him back, but i’m glad the right person did it. The rest of the crew are fun with Bishop being another standout.  That being said part of the reason there isn’t a lot of focus is simply because in additoin to our brave crew the book is juggling a LOT of characters.. the morlocks and calisto, both given a proper treatment after wya too long, jumbo carnation a minor character from morrisons run who was introduced in the same issue he died is emma’s designer, shinobi shaw and christian frost, the latter I question why a main relative of one of marvel’s a-list mutants who was one of marvel’s earlier gay characters hasn’t been used in a big way till now but no time like the present, Sebastian and the people he shares his big bad spot with Homines Verde aka those tweens who ran the hellfire club during jason aaron’s run because the man is nuts and who I only seemd to liked, brillinatly revamped as a racist replacemnt for the hellfire club and so far a clever threat. The book is just stuffed iwth good characters, beautiful art, and a great tone that combines spectacular humor with really good story and worldbuilding. It’s also a nice contrast to hickman’s stuff: don’t get me wrong I love hickman’s writing style but it’s nice to have something JUST as good.. but with a cheerier tone and less weariness to it, while still not lacking weight. I can’t wait to see where this goes.. it’s a pirates life for me. 

Excalibur:  Like most of the dawn of X-Line outside of fallen angels, more on that in a minute and even then that had an intresting new directoin for betsy braddock, I was pumped for this one. A team I loved: While I struggled to find a run I loved with Claremont’s run having Brian Braddock be a raging dick whose terrible to his girlfriend and gets away with cheating on her and Claremont not really bothering to explain Saturnyne or other characters and their history with Brian well to us yanks who never had the chance to read those tales.. though why stories by alan moore and chris claremont haven’t been republished properly or in epic collections is beyond me. Warren Ellis, who I now loathe for being a scheming weasel who treated women like garbage, had a decent run with plenty of warlock, in a weird phase where he thought he was doug, Moira and Wolfsbane stuff I loved.. but also had 30-40 something pete wisdom shacking up with 18 year old at most kitty pryde, with Pete at the time being basically Warren Ellis badass self insert character, and given recent revelations i’m pretty sure he damn well knew kitty was just 18 and even if he didn’t having his own fanfic character deflower her is just all kinds of EWWWWWW. He also had Colossus, fresh of being a villian for a while for understandable reasons, nearly beat pete into a coma in a jealous rage over the ex.. the ex he dated while she was still a minor, and left because HE , and editorial, was uncomfortable with it for damn obvious reasons. I can see why fans like to see her as bisexual and pair her with Illiayna.. I mean why the fuck not? They have better chemistry than most of he hetrosexual intrests and are paried because of that and not because the writer wanted to make out iwth kitty as a teenager and forgot “oh yeah she’s fictional and i’m 40!”  Christ thank god for Gerry Duggan.  But yeah moving on from that I was still pumped as a magical x-men book with Besty Braddock now captain freaking britan, and apocalypse on the roster. And rictor and jubille? nad rouge and gambit I guess.. I don’t knokw if they fit but whatever. Sign me up. The actual result is a mixed back. I do like Tini Howard’s work here to a point: Betsy gets good character stuff and theres actually good tension from the fact that the new captain britan is no longer primarily a british ctizen, and the book brought back a character I felt marvel needed to do more with: Jamie. if you don’t know, Jamie is betsy and brian’s, her brother and the former captain britian, older brother who went insane due to his powers and thus just goes around in his underwear convinced reality isn’t real and he can do what he wants and the tension with Jamie refusing to have anything to do with his brother for no good reason is really good. Rictor and Apocalypse are likewise good sensable additons: Rictor turns out to be a natural to being a druid which is a nice twist and makes sense given when he lost his powers the biggest issue with that was loosing touch with earth after having a connection to it be a vital part of him for years. Apocalypse as an ominus chess master slowly securing magic for mutantkind with some goal we’re about to get answers to is really investing and adds a layer to his character, that much like doctor doom he’s as much sorecer as he is scinetest and given the guy’s immortal, it dosen’t feel like it was pulled out of nowhere.  The problem is the other half of the cast.. dosen’t really work. I fucking love Jubilee, a faviroite of mine as an xman despite not being a huge 90′s x-men cartoon fan, just feels kinda shoe horned in. Her son becomes a dragon and she worries about him constantly, but her worrying about her son possibly not being a mutant on mutant land could be done in any other x-book, and fraknly I feel her personality would fit better with the maruaders, and it’d be intresting to see kitty and her on the same team since both really haven’t interacted. Here she just feels like “well tini wanted jubilee and no one else did soooo I made her son a dragon to justify getting her”. I feel more could be done and hope Tini has better plans for her. Rouge is one of my faviorte x-men and All New X Factor and Kelly Thompsons work with him and Rouge made me like Gambit again, and I DO love their marriage and it was a way better idea than the one Guggenhiem had planned.. but while the idea of Rouge being reborn is intresting and all, she still dosen’t really get to do much and like Jubilee just feels weirldy out of place while Remy has that plus he’s annoying, as while he’s the only one rightfully supscious of apocalypse he also won’t shut the fuck up about it for five minutes. Ig et where he’s coming from  but it dosen’t make him less annoying. These aren’t bad characters, but sof ar they just feel weirdly out of place in a magic based book and unlike Rictor tini hasn’t made any of htem but Rouge feel in place. 

That being said I could ignore that more.. but the villians are also week. So far at least, as the return of Satyurne has given the book it’s first good antagonist.. but what I feel drags the book down the most from it’s potential is the bad guys; Morgan Le Fay is the first antaognist, being mad at apocalypse’s intrusions and corrputing Brian.. but her motives are just so boring: She wants power and to rule, she hates mutants... while “hates mutants” is a qualifier for every other antagonist so far, she just feels bland.. Tini just dosen’t make her feel like a good antagonist and it’s a shame as mutant hater or not she’s something DIFFRENT from the throngs of mutant hating conspiracies, mostly from russia in the other books... she’s just so bland it dosen’t work. And after her is Cullen Bloodstone who as far as I can tell is written out of character.. haven’t read his book but I had both a friend confirm it and having read his marvel wiki entry, it just seems like an odd turn to have him be a racist asshole. But even with all my problems and underwhelm here.. I still WANT the book to get from okay to amazing, and feel it genuinely has the potetial. I’ve seen books sharply improve after a rough first arc, Duggan himself showed me that with his Guardians run. Sometimes it just takes time for something to truly blossom and I have a feeling even with my issues, with x of swords coming up howard’s going to flip it all on it’s head and leave me standing there gasping like a moron. I have hope for that. And if nothing else the book is at least UNIQUE. And not in a trainwreck way: by giving mutants a piece of the magic pie and having them tackle far weirder threats, it’s at least doing something new and it probably lands for other people if not me, and if nothing else it does brian 80 times better than the claremont run did. not a high bar but I do like the character and it’s nice to see him take such an intresting path, and the same goes for Betsy. Tini’s still got magic to do, and I have a feeling it’s going to take me by storm very soon. 

Fallen Angels: Now for the other half of the coin as it were. Some fans weren’t happy about Betsy getting her old body back, and yes Psylocke wasn’t orignally asian but a white british woman bodyswapped iwth a japanese assasian and yes that’s as ludicrious and unteitonally offensive as it sounds, because horrible implications of said Body Swap or not, Psylocke was one of the few asian superheros of note. So to compromise , Hickman and co decided to split the diffrence: Betsy would come back and get a rank up to captain britan, while Kwannon, said assasian, would take over as Psylocke. Hence Excalibur above and fallen angels here and I was excited about it. The Body Swap thing went on a decade too long and this way fans got the character they knew as Psylocke in another book while the face they recognized would finally get some fleshing out. I was excited about that and while probably the least excited about this book of the intitial 5, it did have an intresting lead, two characters I did like (Kid Cable I grant was only under hickman who turned him from that brat version of cable who killed the one I really love to a good character in his own right), and an intresting antagonist in a sentient machine.  In practice it was okay. The best I can say is that writer Brian Hill DOES do a great job taking a mostly minor x-character and really fleshing her out and making her engaging and Kwannon’s quest to save her daughter is really compelling.. but the premise of those who don’t fit with krakoa dosen’t work with the roster given. Laura Kinney is not only sticking with the x-23 name after dropping the wolverine mantle for no reason previously, something Hickman fixed as soon as he realized how fans felt for her apperance in the main book, while Cable feels nothing like the far more fun version from Hickman’s X-Men and later Duggan’s Cable. Add in Husk and Bling who do deserve to be on a team but feel out of place here, and it just.. is okay. The book has an intresting angagonist and a great lead, but just dosen’t work as a team book and would’ve been better off being JUST about kwannon herself, who is far and away the best part about the book and i’m glad she got fleshed out. Not TERRIBLE but nothing special and it’s a shame given the antagonist, whose name I can’t even remember at this point, is intresting and ties into mutantkind’s greatest enmies being man and machine accoridng to house and powers.. basically a decent concep twith a flawed execution. Maybe hill’ sbatman and hte outisders run is better. I need to get on that. That being said the premise and idea is so far being done well in Hellions which we’ll get to, even if I’m being cautious really getting into the book with Zeb Wells track record. But more on that in a bit. 

X-Force: Time to make noise, bad guys leave us no choice.. you know the rest. But yeah X-force. The concept here grabbed me, having X-Force rather than just be the black ops squad but be literal black ops for krakoa, was really great and fit the brave new world.. what worried me was the writer, Benjamin Percy. Now a lot of x-fans probably knew him from the much beloved “Wolverine: The Long Night” podcast, which i’ve heard is utterly fantastic as is it’s followup.. but I hadn’t heard it, and had only heard of Percy from DC comics where under his belt was an okay teen titans run and a not very good and politcally unsubtle green arrow book. And i’m not against politics in comics it just wasn’t done at all well there and the “oliver queen looses hif ourture due to a shadowy conspiracy thing” was already done better by jeff lemire. So yeah I was going to give this a chance but figured like those books it’d start strong and then peter out.  I. Was. Wronnnnggg. X-Force is easily one of the best of the dawn of x and uses said premise well. It started a bit roughly, mostly becasue the first arc idnd’t make clear x-force didn’t exist yet but was a great origin story: a squad of military commandos working for a shadowy consirtum who become x-force’s big bad, plunge onto Krakoa and massacre a bunch of mutantas and assinate charles xavier. He comes back, though it’s trickier for obvious reasons, but it’s clear from this, and from wolverine and kid omega’s sucessful investigation and finding domino, that this can’t go on and thus X-Forces is formed; The intellegence and black ops arm of Krakoa and the one arm of it’s goverment exempt from the ‘dont’ kill humans rule”. What followed was nearly a years worth of fast paced adventures with good character stuff: Wolverine is in his element, kid omega, while I had my doubts due to quinten being way overused , turned out to be a perfect choice basically being a more compitent teenage sterling archer, cocky and loving this but also really good at his job, while Domino gets a great arc dealing with her trauma over her mutalation and having some of her power stolen by the shadowy masked dickheads while Colossus deals with his trauma over what went down when he rescued some Russian mutants, with the book slowly building up new threats and towards a showdown with Russia, something that’s also been built up by conflicts in Wolverine and Mauraders, which again makes the world of x feel more like an actual world instead a bunch of comics in one cast herd.  Jean Grey is good for intellegence, though by now seems to have noped out as she couldn’t take the toll, it’s not for everyone and most notably after 5 or 6 years of being treated worse and worse and written worse and worse and becoming a bigger and bigger piece of shit Beast is FINALLY put in the right spot: his darker turns aren’t ignored but he’s back to being an actually intellegent hero as X-force’s director, still a bit greasy but now for good reason and without a god complex or some such bullshit and with a tiny bit of his humor back. Not much else to say really, X-Force is well paced, enjoyable and gritty, getting the spirit of the team at it’s best down right while doing something fresh with it. 

New Mutants (Ed Brisson) Last one, New Mutants is the odd duck of the dawn of x line in terms of how it was launched. Fallen Angels ended up being a mini series both due  to Hill being busy and it’s cast being needed elsewhere but will presmibly get a follow up later, but it’s not the ONLY mini series in the line with Fantastic four/x-men, the giant sized one shots and now Empyre: X-Men all debuting in wave 2. New Mutants however is the first book to change writers and said writer STARTED in the middle of hickman’s run, partly due to scheduling delays but even before that it was partly by design and those issues haven’t been collected yet, with hickman’s short run being collected first. So you have a run that builds off what Hickman started but with it’s own ideas that started insidei t and suprisingly it .. really works.  While I do think there are better books in the line Brisson’s new mutants is enjoyable, combining humor and character work. New Mutants focuses on the sextant, which was first brought up in hickman’s run, the series of habitats for younger mutants on krakoa that the new mutants look out for, and while the original new mutants are in space, Armor decides to try and bring some old friends in to join in paradise with the help of Glob Herman, that big pink guy with a visable skeleton and eyes, and Maxine and Manon, who in the tradition of layla miller were created for an event and not great htere but turned out amazing under the right writer.. who I think also wrote that event but whatever, a pair of empaths and telepaths who have trouble grasping the right ethics for using their powers.  The four go to get one of my faviorite x-men back: BEAK! I missed him even if he’s weirdly suddenly repowered. Beak and his wife Angel only haven’t joiend in with their kids because his dad’s sick, and things soon escalate when a bunch of criminals try holding them all hostage and it’s up to boom boom, bored since everyone left her alone, to save the day! After that we deal with Magik rangling them and the team’s new mission statment: not wanting ot mess up again like she did with beak, who did join them but not without loosing his dad and then his memory of his dad thanks to the twins misguided efforts, Armor still wants to try welcoming new mutants in with the vetrans help, and thus we have our puprose: focusing both on how these younger mutant 20 somethigns of various ages from early to late work together to make a better world nad help their own get back to this world. it’s intresting.. I’m not in love with it like mauraders or x-force, but it’s still pretty good and their first big foe so far, DoX, a blog that well.. doxes mutants that haven’t arrived yet, seems to be intresting. Not much to say just pretty good and and better at mixing comedy and character stuff, and getting the cast right. Ed Brisson had already proven himself on old man logan, but this cements him as one of the hottest new x-writers around and i’m glad he was given a book here. He’s also succeded in making me actually like Glob Herman so that’s a plus. 

Fantastic Four/X-Men The first title of wave 2 and easily one of the best, right up there with mauraders nad probably JUSST behind it and ONLY because i’ts a mini series, giving the X-Men their first real step into the rest of hte marvel universe. Sure the 4 had cameoed in the first issue and there’s been mentions of krakoa in other books and one off issues but mostly Krakoa really hadn’t impacted anything.. but that first issue also set things up with Scott’s conversation with Sue Richards

Yeah and in case those who haven’t been aware of what’s going on with the FF lately and either remember franklin as a 6-11 year old or wondered why the hell he was suddenly a teen when they read this crossover, it’s actually simple; At the end of secret wars the Richards family was put on a bus, also so marvel could shove the ff as a proper team out the door due to the whole fox rights thing, and when Dan Slott had brought them back.. and cleverly had more time pass for the richards than for the 616 proper, so he could age Franklin up to his late teens and Valeria up to her early ones, allowing the richards children to actually age since Franklin’s age always had to stay vauge due to marvel’s vage and wobbly time scale. This way they get both consitant ages and more agency.  But the return also came with a price as Franklin, who if you didn’t know is so powerful he can create whole universe and shape the sturcture of the universe, had his powers break saving his family, and thus since he came back, he’s onlyg got so much of them left in the tank before they run out entirely, and it’s been an issue for him in Slott’s run as he worries about being the normal human in a fantastic family and comes to a head here, though rather than Hickman himself, who as mentioned last time has a marvelous track record with the family or FF series writer dan slott Hickman choose a wild card for this, though had both Hickman and Slott’s permission to do whatever he wanted: Chip Zdarsky, a modern marvel for marvel who’d writtne the four in marvel two in one but for some reason didn’t get the main book and this book makes me hope whenever Dan Slott bows out he gets his turn and while this is his first x-men work, Zdarsky proves he’s just as good here as is in most of his work on Howard the Duck, Jughead and Star Lord.. a weird selection I know but all classics. 

With this power outage, Franklin is worried his dad is, at least subconciously, not really trying to help him and to make matters worse teh x-men show up to offer their help.. and Franklin his birthright. The arguments made by both sides are great and I will be covering the series in full soon but in a nutshell the four dont’ want to give up their son/nephew, Reed dosen’t trust Xavier and feels he wants to use his son’s powers while the x-men feel it’s franlin’s choice and he’s old enough to make it, he belongs with them and he’ll be safer there. It also works because Franklin understandably isn’t swayed by either as neither is reallyt alking to him more at him, especially his parents .. and only tries the gate when Kitty Pryde, the two  bonded back in the 80s and a young franklin stopped her from comitting suicide long story but really moving, is the only one to tell him it’s his choice. This dosen’t go quite well though since Reed Richards, father of the year, decided to make a device to mask his son’s mutant gene and no one, including his own family, is happy about htis.  Naturally Franklin, with Val’s help, runs away.. and then as if it couldn’t get worse DOOM shows up wanting to help so now it’s a three way dance between them for hte fate of franklin. The series has gorgeous art form the dodsons a really damn compelling story and great setup for further stories for both lines and feels like the best of both franchises. It’s the x-men’s first huge impact on the rest of the marvel universe,a nd it feels like it with the ending showing that and showing this might not be the last time both sides crossover. It’s everything you could want from a crossover and i’m only being so brief because I want to review it soon as a huge fan of both groups. Easily one of the best x-men stories of the line and one of the best stories for both groups period. 

Wolverine:  We’re onto the final two, and Percy’s second book and the first solo.. and it’s logan again! Makes sense though: Wolverine only just came back from the dead, and while both is daughter and alternate future self carried the woverline banner for him, the original hasn’t gotten his own ongoing in some time. And so far.. it’s pretty good> the first issues a bit messy due to it’s lenght, but overall the book is intresting and has Logan graple with being the best at waht he does and if he can be better or if he deserves paradise while also delivering a compelling solo mission teaming Wolverine up with a federal agent who resents mutants. it also does some good world building, explaning why Krakoan drugs have things like wait lists (they want to control production closely both to avoid having the flower taken away and for quality control), and expanding the russia subplot while using Dracula of all people as a major antagonist, which is clever especailly since this isn’t his first rodeo with the x-men. Just a fun book wiht loads of promise.

Hellions: NOt much to say here as it’s hard to judge after two issues, buti f nothing else this series brought back the delightfully batshit Nanny, who just with last weeks issue offered to nurse Greycrow (who had his name changed from scalphunter because of course marvel did why wouldn’t they) and falling down. It combines humor with an odd but well thought out cast and makes Alex Summers intresting without making everyone else assholes, a hard but earned feet. If it continues to be good.. I dunno, especially since i haven’t been impressed by any of zeb wells other works especially his new mutants run, good god that one’s am ess, but so far he’s winning me over with a clever concept and roster full of deep cuts.  Final Thoughts:  I won’t be covering Empyre: X_men, though I did enjoy it and i’l save that one for next time. For now this has been a hell of a year of x-men comics, with even the weaker books still having something intresting and none being outright terribule and only one had a bad grasp on some of it’s cast and for a line this big and expansive, that’s a gold medal achivment. After YEARS of stasis the x-men have finally risen again better, bolder and stranger than ever. IS every book A+ gold star etc etc, no, but what’s important.. is that it’s all DECENT. There’s enough standout books to make it work but as i’ve made clear what isn’t the best of the best is still good or decent. There’s nothing bad, no one phoning it in or not giving an effort, everyone is trying thier hardest and succeding on SOME level even if not completely and that.. that’s truly amazing and I look forward to more of it as this line continues. Pax Krakoa and hopefully i’ll see you again. 

[unworthingtons]

I JUST PAID 15$ FOR IN FLIGHT WI-FI TO CHECK THE NEWS. IM SO EXCITED FOR BETSY AS CAPTAIN BRITAN AND APOCALYPSE LOOKS SO FUCKIN SEXY IN HIS NEW COSTUME

[terrorhqs]

love that so many of the admin faces are poc!! how will issues of race be handled here, given the time period? (obviously I’m sure no one’s going to rp a racist, but in general is this more an au with equality or should backgrounds be considerate of things irl people went through?

this was such a profound, essential question we genuinely wanted everyone on the team online when we answered it. the short form answer?

yes for equality, but ALSO yes for acknowledging people’s backgrounds !! we don’t see it as an either/or, not one bit. we want to promote an environment that’s like a micro-universe — the Promethean as an elusive structure where the constraints of the real world seem so far away that they might as well be dissolved entirely. and we want this to only deepen the more the journey progresses, and the more challenges the crew will face.

this being said, both me and admin K. intend to absolutely roast Britan’s ass. her, by exploring the Irish background of her char, the Captain of the Promethean, and me by exploring the conflict of a Commonwealth soldier who is also a man of color (are we really protecting England if England is the one you need protection from?). so there’s that on That. We will absolutely not condone racist themes being involved in the current interactions on the Promethean, but of course they can be included in your character’s past.